Leadership is a Field

I believe lead­er­ship is a kind of psy­chic field where noble acts take place, acts of self-affir­ma­tion, trust, love and ethics. When the field is there, the right things occur, the right things come out of our mouths. Our deeds are part of a greater sto­ry. When the field is off, we stumble.

I was once doing some man­age­ment train­ing work in a very iso­lat­ed loca­tion. To the west, a big snow-cov­ered moun­tain hung behind the out­post like a dark cape. Scrub pines and junipers ran down the moun­tain’s flanks to meet cold plains to the east below. 

One day, after a ses­sion, a woman named Ingred stayed behind to talk. She had seemed to be one of the san­est, most ratio­nal and expe­ri­enced man­agers in the room. I admired her insights dur­ing class. But as we talked togeth­er and our con­ver­sa­tion deep­ened, a great sad­ness seemed to envel­op her. She talked about how trapped she felt in a nar­row­ly defined job, and worse, how trapped she felt by the inbred, dys­func­tion­al pol­i­tics of a work­place lit­er­al­ly hun­dreds of miles from the near­est city and fifty miles from the near­est mean­ing­ful gro­cery store. She felt dis­cred­it­ed and dis­missed — emp­ty — and this had gone on for sev­er­al years. She’d asked to trans­fer to anoth­er loca­tion for the com­pa­ny but was always told she was most valu­able exact­ly where she was. The alter­na­tive was to quit, move those hun­dreds of miles and start over, and she was hav­ing a very hard time think­ing about that.

Final­ly, after a cou­ple of hours it came out. She felt sui­cide might be an attrac­tive and ratio­nal option. After all, she had no fam­i­ly, lived alone, had no friends among her co-work­ers, and so lived only for her bor­ing job. So while she was health­i­er in some ways than oth­ers around her who were enmeshed in the high dra­ma of their con­flicts and messy rela­tion­ships, in oth­er ways she felt so unseen and depressed that it seemed rea­son­able to end her life. I sat with her in the vacant train­ing room as the sun went down and it began to snow; lis­ten­ing, reflect­ing, try­ing to be a good friend even though I was a stranger. At some point well past sun­set I began to feel that I had noth­ing more to offer. I felt awk­ward, maybe as emp­ty as she did.

It was then I heard myself blurt out a ques­tion: “Ingred, do you think this is a beau­ti­ful place? I mean the moun­tain and trees and rocks here. Are these things beau­ti­ful to you?” 

“Yes,” she replied, but it was clear from her eyes that she was won­der­ing where I was going.

“Do you think the moun­tain and the trees and rocks need you to end your life?” I asked. I had no idea where that ques­tion had come from.

She thought for awhile and then very qui­et­ly she said “Thank you.” Her face relaxed and she straight­ened up her shoul­ders. “No, they don’t,” she said more firmly.

We kept talk­ing and the moment passed, but she came back once or twice to that notion that the nat­ur­al world around her did not require her death in any pre­ma­ture way. She was just feel­ing very, very alone.

Some­times I think it’s the least crazy peo­ple that have the hard­est time. When I asked a friend about this point the oth­er day, she said to me, yes, she saw that, too. She saw it in her­self. I asked her how she coped and she told me that at some point she real­ized the crazy-mak­ing place was exact­ly where she was sup­posed to be, that in that place you were sup­posed to lis­ten to the Uni­verse for the lessons about what to do. That was the point of being there.

And so, of course, all that remind­ed me of Ingred and our exchange that night at the out­post. There was a moment when I was feel­ing very dumb, not know­ing what to do or say, but then some­thing showed up, showed up in that field, came through me for her with­out my even understanding.

There was an irony, too. A year lat­er, Ingred wrote to me to tell me that one of the peo­ple in my class had indeed com­mit­ted sui­cide, dri­ving his truck off the road at high speed. For awhile Ingred wrote me reg­u­lar­ly to share news of the place. I’m afraid I was a lousy cor­re­spon­dent and even­tu­al­ly we lost touch, but it was clear she was doing much better. 

Before I left that remote moun­tain, Ingred gave me a bead­ed med­i­cine bag she had acquired up north from an Indi­an artist/healer. She want­ed me to have it. It was a sym­bol of our con­ver­sa­tion and the role she thought I had played for her. Although grate­ful — the med­i­cine bag is one of my most trea­sured pos­ses­sions — you must know it was­n’t me that did much of any­thing. It was the moun­tain and the trees and the rocks. It was the snow that fell down that night into the dark­ness. Some­how these things had giv­en her hope. 

It did­n’t come from me. It came from the field. 

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